CHAPTER TEN

“I Had Rather Be Right than Be President”

WHEN THE STEAMBOAT Detroit hit a snag and foundered on the Ohio River in late summer 1838, the newspapers reported that Clay and John J. Crittenden were on board. They were not, instead having booked passage on the Buffalo, which rescued the Detroit’s stranded passengers. “Whig boats do not founder,” Clay joked to a friend concerned by the news. He told of taking on some “Locofocos” from the wreck and added, “We shall I hope soon have to relieve others of them from the more important wreck they have made of the Administration.”¹

Indeed, the lingering effects of the financial panic and the Democrats’ inability to offset them pointed to an all but certain Whig victory in 1840. Nevertheless Clay cautioned that they still had a lot of work to do. “The adversary is in possession of the field,” he noted. As Van Buren’s continuing frustration over the Subtreasury stalemate increased public dissatisfaction, even Clay’s caution dropped away. “If we do not beat him,” he said, “we deserve to be gibbeted.”²

Although Clay was the undisputed leader of the party in Congress, the prospect of his candidacy for 1840 did not stir universal enthusiasm among Whigs, and their qualms annoyed him. The objection that he would unite the Democrats like no other Whig was especially exasperating. “I do not like to be run down by other Candidates or would be Candidates on our own side,” he grumbled. He scoffed at fears over provoking Jackson and Van Buren supporters: “as if that party were to elect a Whig Presdt.!”³

One of the Whig contenders from 1836, Hugh Lawson White, decided not to try again and in the end supported Clay, but Daniel Webster and William Henry Harrison were obviously in the hunt. Daniel Webster’s poor showing in 1836 had not blunted his ambition nor slowed his plans, and though Clay was aware of Harrison’s appeal, he believed Webster was the stronger opponent. Discerning Whigs, he thought, would eventually realize that Harrison was a shallow vessel. Webster was anything but shallow, and at first it appeared as though Clay had reason to be worried. Webster remained bitter over the Harrison and White candidacies in 1836, and he sustained toward Clay a special resentment for not supporting him in that contest. Webster accordingly resolved shortly after Van Buren’s inauguration to proceed toward the nomination, this time with more finesse.

He could never match Clay’s influence in the Senate, so he aimed at attracting rich business interests in Massachusetts, New York, and Philadelphia, especially the last, where Nicholas Biddle’s bank kept him on handsome retainers that were barely concealed bribes.⁴ His extensive connections in New York City included Whig clubs and the editors of influential newspapers, and he hoped their support would set into motion an irresistible momentum. Because the South detested him, he need not worry about alienating southerners, which made the task of satisfying northerners easier.⁵

In May 1837, the Godlike Dan’l traveled through the West, a ploy to drum up support and counter Harrison’s popularity in the region. By then the economic panic had presented him with a new issue, and he laid into Van Buren’s ineffectiveness, excoriated Benton’s hard-money stand, and blamed the Specie Circular for destroying the economy. His handsome second wife, Caroline, fifteen years his junior, and his bashful, pretty nineteen-year-old daughter, Julia, accompanied him on the trip, helping to offset his reputation as something of a rake. The family also came overland from Maysville for a weeklong visit at Ashland. Clay’s generous hospitality included lavish dinners, continuously filled glasses, exciting outings to horse races, and sparkling repartee. By the time the Websters departed, a casual observer would have supposed that he and Clay were close friends rather than wary competitors. Clay marveled over Webster’s “defective judgment in what concerns himself and his prospects,” but the large and apparently adoring crowds the New Englander attracted in places like Louisville gave the Kentuckian pause. He insisted that these demonstrations for Webster were only “homage to his ability” and certainly not enthusiasm for his potential candidacy.⁶ Webster’s popularity worried him, though, and by that summer Clay was criticizing his rival’s “shocking” ambition that threatened to divide Whigs and lose them the 1840 election.

In the months that followed, they shouldered at each other, sometimes in silly ways. When Webster initiated a move to repeal the Specie Circular, Clay used some legislative trickery to preempt the measure with one of his own, boosting his prestige with the business community. Clay claimed that the maneuver was not meant to antagonize Webster, but he nonetheless grumbled about the effort to give Webster credit for the proposal. “This competition about the resolution,” he admitted, “was unworthy of either of us.” Webster remarked in exasperation, “So the world goes!”⁷

Despite the large crowds he had attracted in the West, Webster’s success on his 1837 tour was more show than real, and Clay had discerned that. He was nervous about Webster’s strength in New York, though. As it happened, that too proved illusory, because Thurlow Weed believed Webster’s ties to Biddle were as toxic as was his early career as a Federalist. But even so, Clay’s New York supporters worked to quash the Webster boomlet in their all-important state by insisting that any nominee be chosen by a national Whig convention.⁸

The idea for the convention did not originate with Clay—early that summer, William Henry Harrison’s Ohio supporters were urging one to nominate their man—but Clay approved of it as a way to fend off Webster.⁹ The idea made political sense, because it was the best way to avoid the chaotic multiple candidacies of 1836. Yet by striking down Webster with this tactic, Clay courted peril, for the timing of the convention was crucial to his chances in it. With the economy in ruin, Clay’s popularity instantly rose as his dire warnings about the Democrats’ fiscal policy seemed confirmed by events. Suddenly his prescriptions for putting things right through government intervention, especially by reviving the Bank, seemed sensible, and because Clay was their principal advocate, his candidacy looked popular and politically logical. The sooner he could be placed before a convention the better, since improving financial conditions would likely dim the people’s enthusiasm for his program and diminish for Whigs his attractiveness as a candidate.

The Whigs, however, quarreled over when to hold their convention. Harrison’s supporters wanted it to occur in May 1838, but everyone else thought that was much too early. Clay was among them, although mistakenly, because an early convention at the height of the country’s economic misery would have been to his greatest advantage. Hugh Lawson White advised that Clay’s best chance was to have the nomination made in the summer of 1839 at the latest. Clay, however, began to take a dim view of the convention altogether. By the spring of 1838, his suspicions about Harrison’s maneuvers were growing. Harrison’s people had first proposed the convention, Clay noted, and eventually he thought he could see their reasoning. Harrison could not secure a national endorsement (meaning one that included the South, where he was weak) in any other fashion.¹⁰Southern and southwestern Whigs were repelled by the idea of a convention because they saw it as emulating the process that had produced Van Buren’s candidacy. Clay held a considerable advantage in the South, and if these Whigs refused to attend, it would deal Clay a serious blow and boost Harrison’s odds.¹¹

But Clay had already agreed to accept a convention’s decision by the time he entertained these doubts. And though he finally realized that an early date would be to his advantage, the goals of state leaders determined when the party would make its nomination. They did not want a presidential nominee complicating their local elections, contests in which Whig victories were otherwise assured. Consequently, in April 1838 a Whig caucus in Washington put out the word that the convention would be held in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, a full year and a half later. Clay agreed to this, and though doing so was in retrospect a mistake, he had no choice.¹²

Meanwhile, his conviction that Webster was his most dangerous opponent persisted into the spring of 1838, and he finally decided to confront the problem directly. He met with Webster on June 13 for a lengthy conversation in which he candidly assessed Webster’s chances as less than slim. He should step aside and avoid dividing the party, Clay said. The meeting was friendly, but Clay left it convinced that Webster would continue his quest for the nomination. “He will be control[led] by his friends,” Clay concluded, “or will submit to the force of circumstances.” And while Clay believed that Webster’s friends would eventually persuade him to quit, he also thought Webster would do so “slowly and sullenly.”¹³

Clay was right about Webster’s reluctance to withdraw, but he did not seem to realize the perverse pleasure Webster took in remaining a candidate solely to obstruct him. In part, Webster was motivated by revenge for Clay’s endorsement of Harrison in 1836. The Massachusetts legislature had already returned him to the Senate, but he began avoiding controversial votes in the third session of the Twenty-fifth Congress, as though it mattered. “Mr. Webster has been here several weeks,” Clay mused, “& wraps himself up, so far as I know, in perfect silence.”¹⁴ Yet Webster clearly did not have a chance—Clay was right about that too, and Weed plainly told Webster that he would not be the nominee—but he remained a putative candidate even after he left the country for an extended sojourn in England in 1839. Not until that June did he formally withdraw, in a letter dispatched from London. Webster did not recommend anyone in his stead, but that omission too spoke volumes. By then, though, Clay knew who his real rival was for the nomination.¹⁵

AS EARLY AS 1837, many Whigs were gravitating toward William Henry Harrison, especially in Upstate New York where leaders like Thurlow Weed and William Seward thought him more electable than either Clay or Webster. Harrison had the support of Antimasons in Pennsylvania led by the mordant Thaddeus Stevens. Harrison was also quite strong in Ohio, where he resided, and in Indiana, where he had solid ties from the beginning of his public career. The old general (he was nearing sixty-eight), along with his unofficial campaign manager, Charles Todd, kept in touch with veterans nationwide, men who fondly recalled serving under him and who were sure to give him their votes in 1840 just as they had in 1836. In July 1837, Whigs in Ohio got the ball rolling by nominating him—a surprise to Clay, who had thought he could wrest the state from Harrison.¹⁶

Even after the Ohio nomination, Clay continued to underestimate Harrison’s strength. An observer described as mere “pertinacity” Harrison’s reading of his strong showing in 1836 “as an indication of his strength and popularity.” “Never was a man more deceived,” Clay’s correspondent assured him.¹⁷ Events would prove that judgment quite incorrect, but for a time Clay seemed well justified in accepting it. He had earlier concluded that the western part of New York was for him, as was New England, including Massachusetts, despite Webster’s obstinacy. South Carolina hated Webster and was averse to Harrison, and after Calhoun, preferred Clay, described as “a noble creature” and “the only opposition man who has the slightest chance.”¹⁸ North Carolina, Louisiana, and Georgia were strongly in his column. Even Tennessee looked to be his, much to Andrew Jackson’s chagrin. Old Hickory’s followers made speeches throughout the state imploring Tennesseans to spare him the insult of having his enemy vindicated while the Old Hero still breathed. John Bell chuckled that if Tennessee went for Clay, Jackson would “burst [a] blood vessel & expire.”¹⁹

At first Clay thought that resolutions in the Kentucky legislature recommending him for president were too early and displayed “more zeal than discretion,” but as winter gave way to spring in 1838, his political star was so ascendant that he brimmed with confidence. The Ohio and New York state elections the previous fall had handed Whig candidates impressive victories, returns that Clay interpreted as an overpowering trend.²⁰

Yet sustaining his strength meant walking a fine line to avoid alienating the northern and southern wings of the party. Hard times made that easier in one respect. Although Calhoun routinely denounced the American System as “the source of all our oppression, disorder, and corruption,” he hardly spoke for the South.²¹ Southern Whigs, in fact, were not altogether averse to Clay’s economic ideas, for many elite planters had come to realize that a better transportation system could mean brisker commerce for southern agricultural staples as well as northern manufactured goods. They also recognized the commercial benefits of stable credit and a sound currency. In addition, Clay carefully tempered his views on these matters to avoid appearing doctrinaire. He was flexible about the Bank. He still insisted that the country needed a national bank, for he truly believed that only a central agency could establish and maintain a sound currency, but he admitted its resurrection was not politically feasible in the absence of widespread popular acceptance, which he acknowledged did not exist. He softened his views on the tariff, stating his continued support for the lower duties of the Compromise of 1833, and he gauged state expenditures on internal improvements as sufficiently funded by land revenue distribution, making federal funding unnecessary. When Clay repeated these sentiments to northern audiences, Edward Everett deduced that they signaled “a gentle edging over to Southern ground.”²²

Handling the slavery controversy was not so simple, especially when Calhoun tried to make mischief with it during the already contentious Twenty-fifth Congress. The South Carolinian’s break with the Whigs and his alliance with Van Buren were partly opportunistic, but he also was motivated by his growing belief that Clay was as soft on abolitionism as Webster was hard against slavery.²³ Moreover, while most southerners preferred to let the sleeping dog of slavery lie, Calhoun roused it to rally his section and force northern accommodation. He introduced six resolutions in the Senate on December 27, 1837, four of them markedly provocative. Two of the resolutions repeated Calhoun’s view of the Union as a mere compact of sovereign states in which each exercised complete control of its internal affairs, an obvious way to protect slavery from outside interference. That much the Senate could swallow. The remaining resolutions, however, stuck in the majority’s throat. Calhoun insisted that the federal government not just refrain from interfering with slavery but actively protect it. For good measure, he capped his demands with an assertion that blocking Texas annexation on the basis of slavery was not only unfair to the South but unconstitutional.²⁴

The initiative marked the beginning of Calhoun’s blatant proslavery crusade, thereafter the defining theme of his career, but it was also a way of forcing Henry Clay’s hand on the issue. Along with others, Clay recognized that with the slavery issue, Calhoun’s “real aim [was] to advance the political interest of the mover and to affect mine.”²⁵ He countered with several speeches in the Senate in January and February 1838, his manner “easy and graceful, but imperious and commanding.”²⁶ He criticized Calhoun’s confrontational tone and his agitation of issues such as Texas annexation, an initiative that would only embolden abolitionists and panic southerners. The injury done to the Union would be incalculable. Clay insisted that Calhoun’s menacing approach was not an effective way to protect the rights of slaveholders. Moreover, Clay claimed that his amiable and conciliatory tone was no less firm and much more productive. In addition, he could not “believe that it is prudent or wise to be so often alluding to the separation of the Union. We ought not to be perpetually exclaiming, wolf, wolf, wolf.” He then launched into an effective metaphor:

We are too much in the habit of speaking of divorces, separation, disunion. In private life, if a wife pouts, and frets, and scolds, what would be thought of the good sense or discretion of the husband who should threaten her with separation, divorce, or disunion? Who should use those terrible words upon every petty disagreement in domestic life? No man, who has a heart or right feelings, would employ such idle menaces. He would approach the lady with kind and conciliatory language, and apply those natural and more agreeable remedies, which never fail to restore domestic harmony.²⁷

The passage was classic Clay, illustrating the fundamental difference between his and Calhoun’s temperament, the one whimsical and humorous, the other reflexively dour and dark. When Clay applied this technique, he could draw in followers, charm listeners, and inspire emulation, even by an essentially melancholy man like Abraham Lincoln, who like Clay learned to dress his points in comic garb to make them more appealing. The Senate broke into prolonged laughter over Clay’s domestic allusion. Calhoun glowered.

Clay proposed six resolutions of his own to offset Calhoun’s. Slavery should be exclusively controlled by the states, and petitions to abolish slavery in them should be rejected because they requested Congress to act beyond its authority. On the other hand, Congress could indeed abolish slavery where it exercised jurisdiction, as in the District of Columbia or federal territories, and should accordingly receive any petitions about those areas. He was on record as being adamantly opposed to a general policy that ignored petitions, for it would endanger the fundamental right to seek redress. Instead, he wanted a system to separate the mischievous work of fanatics from the reasonable requests of citizens. Until slavery touched on this issue, Calhoun had agreed that the right to petition was “guaranteed by the Constitution” and that it was a “duty” of Congress to receive them. By 1838, protecting slavery had altered the South Carolinian’s perception of constitutional propriety but not the Kentuckian’s.²⁸

A lengthy debate ensued and the final votes, after much talk, were mixed, but Clay was at least able to persuade the Senate to reject Calhoun’s most intemperate language. Instead, his colleagues agreed that the government should neither protect nor interfere with slavery and that abolitionism was bad because it imperiled the Union. When it was all over, Clay felt that he had deftly stepped around Calhoun’s slavery snare.

The cut-and-thrust matches with Calhoun, though, spilled over into other matters and other arguments. Their exchanges grew testy, even belligerent, and on February 19, 1838, during the debate on the perennial Democrat effort to create the Subtreasury, Clay delivered a blistering four-hour address in which he accused Calhoun of being a Nullifier and, worse, of allying with Van Buren for base political advantage. Both charges visibly stung the South Carolinian, and some thought Clay had gone too far.²⁹ Calhoun struck back in a speech that took him all of three weeks to prepare. It included a less than oblique reference to the Corrupt Bargain as a more pertinent example of politics trumping principle.³⁰ Despite being ill, Clay immediately answered. He did not need “two or three weeks to prepare” his response to Calhoun, he roared, and he then commenced a full-scale attack on the South Carolinian that traced their work together over the course of three decades. He ultimately described Calhoun as a changeling on significant issues. They had worked together and had agreed for years on most important policy measures, but “we concur now in nothing,” Clay announced. “We separate forever.”³¹

Ever since the 1824 campaign, their relations had been tinged with suspicion and sometimes marred by outright mistrust, a state of affairs worsened by the Nullification Crisis, but a shared aversion to Jackson and his policies had drawn them together. Calhoun’s allegiance to the Whigs was never solid, though, just as his allegiance to Van Buren proved equally fragile. And though his increasingly inflexible sectional response to all national problems would eventually have caused a breach with Clay in any case, Calhoun’s abrupt desertion of the Whigs and his support for the Van Buren administration surprised everyone. His and Clay’s final break in early 1838 was particularly unpleasant because it featured clashing egos as much as opposing ideas. Referring to his performance in the Senate on February 19, Clay could gloat that he had “handled Calhoun without gloves,” and the impressive debates (Webster also participated with a spirited defense of Clay that flattened Calhoun with sarcasm) have long been deemed among the most brilliant in the Senate’s history.³² Yet Clay upon reflection gave way to foreboding.

He thought Calhoun’s behavior “most extraordinary” and was troubled by what he perceived as the effort to promote disunion. He grimly assessed his erstwhile friend’s little clique that made up for its small size with relentless activity. Its aim was to persuade southerners that the federal government from its very start had been injuring the South to benefit the North. “I believe in private life he is irreproachable,” Clay concluded, “but I believe he will die a traitor or a madman.”³³

Calhoun freely confessed, “I don’t like Henry Clay.” He was “a bad man, an impostor, a creator of wicked schemes.” Calhoun swore he “wouldn’t speak to” Clay. “But, by God,” Calhoun blurted out in the same breath, “I love him.”³⁴

LUCRETIA REMAINED BUSY with the grandchildren, her church, Ashland’s dairy, and Lexington’s community activities. As always, she was self-sufficient and frugal, and Clay worried that she kept it from him when she ran short of funds. Her days at Ashland were mottled with everyday aches and pains, sometimes requiring the attention of Lexington doctor Thomas P. Satterwhite or W. W. Whitney. She was feeling her age and having to resort to small treatments and prescriptions more than she had before. Sometimes she indulged herself with little pleasures, which pleased Clay. She was fond of “good fresh Macaroni,” and he was glad to ask Julie Duralde Clay to send some up from New Orleans.³⁵

Life at Ashland during these years was often enlivened by a houseful of grandchildren, causing Clay to report cheerfully that the place had “all the animation which it exhibited twenty years ago.”³⁶ Anne’s boys, Eugene and Edward, “as fat as seals,” often stayed at Ashland, and her daughter, Lucretia Clay Erwin, had started school but was having a hard time “fixing her attention on her studies.” Clay wanted Thomas to consult with Lucretia about where to send the Duralde children to school. Clay preferred that they board with Thomas and Mary and offered to pay a generous allowance to offset the boys’ expenses. The suggestion was a sign of the salutary effect Mary was having on his son.³⁷

“During a long life,” he wrote to the children of a friend, expressing what was surely his wish for his children’s children, “I have observed that those are the most happy who love, honor, and obey their parents; who avoid idleness and dissipation, and employ their time in constant labor, both of body and mind; and who perform, with regular and scrupulous attention, all their duties to our Maker, and his only Son, our blessed Saviour.”³⁸ In sum, it was a clear statement of the millennial spirit that fueled the exuberant reformist ideas of Whigdom. The world could be made better through hard, careful work and obedience to a higher authority, whether vested in one’s parents or in God. Speaking from experience and “much observation,” he had come to the conclusion that anyone “who is addicted to play loses money, time, sleep, health and character.”³⁹

Despite the didactic tone he often took with his children and grandchildren, Clay believed that everyone must find his own moral way as an exercise of free will. Whig philosophy lauded temperance and Whig reformers promoted it, but Clay believed it a worthy cause only so long as it used “mild measures”:

The misfortune in human affairs is that we convince ourselves of what we suppose to be right, and then we endeavor, as we ought to do, to persuade others; but if we fail to convince them, we then resort to force. Hence, religious intolerance, proscription, the stake &c. Now, it is generally admitted among us, that in Religion, the greatest of all our interests, every man should be left free to follow any or none, as he pleases. But if we may not compel men to be religious have we a right to oblige them to be sober? Have we a right to constrain them to eat or not to eat, to drink or not to drink, not as they please, but as we choose to think it best for them?⁴⁰

With uncanny foresight he predicted that temperance would “destroy itself whenever it resorts to coercion, or mixes in the politics of the Country.” When Massachusetts Whigs passed a law that required all liquor sales to be a minimum of fifteen gallons (to suppress the trade by mandating a high quantity), Clay called it “indefensible.” Temperance was creditable only as moral suasion, not legislative coercion. “No man likes to have, or ought to have, cold water or brandy, separately or in combination, put in or kept out of his throat upon any other will than his own.”⁴¹

His determination to see his grandchildren well educated stemmed partly from a mixture of Enlightenment rationalism and millennial liberalism. But it also resulted from his awareness of his own deficiencies in formal schooling, which he often lamented. It is inaccurate, however, to take at face value contemporary assessments of him as indifferent to books and uninterested in abstract thoughts. Possibly Clay understood the maxim summed up in the couplet “Good rule of thumb / In politics, too smart is dumb” and accordingly cultivated the image of a practical man with useful ideas rather than an intellectual like Hugh Swinton Legaré or even, for that matter, Daniel Webster or John C. Calhoun. But occasionally he let slip that he was an astute political philosopher and a confident intellectual. When Francis Lieber asked him to read his book on legal and political hermeneutics, Clay made perceptive suggestions for its improvement, some as arcane as the distinction between transcendent and extravagant construction and some as practical as a greater emphasis on the legislature’s obligation to adhere to constitutional prescriptions. Lieber thought enough of Clay’s remarks to incorporate the changes into a subsequent edition.⁴²

Clay’s suggestions to James for broadening himself with a reading program reveal what Clay regarded as essential historical knowledge. He recommended a thorough grounding in Greco-Roman traditions by studying histories of ancient Greece, Plutarch’s writings, and Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. He also recommended David Hume’s history of England, William Russell’s study of modern Europe, Henry Hallam’s multivolume history of the Middle Ages, William Robertson’s three-volume history of the reign of Charles V, John Marshall’s five-volume biography of Washington, and Carlo Botta’s history of the American Revolution. “You should adopt some systematic course, as to time,” he told James, “that is to read so many hours out of the 24.”⁴³

He worried about James, whose move to Missouri was not working out. Clay repeatedly urged him to try to be happy and stay busy despite his being “loansome,” and the reading program was apparently designed in part to give the boy something to do. Clay above all feared that James would fall into dissolute habits and follow the twisted path of Thomas (only recently rescued by Mary Mentelle) and John, who drank too much and whom Clay suspected of feigning illness at Princeton to get out of his studies.⁴⁴

“I have feared your solitary condition might prompt you into it [dissipation],” he warned James, and he urged the young man to consider “any arrangement by which you can come back to Kentucky and live in the midst of your friends.” As the boy’s loneliness fed his gloom, Clay sent money and advice: Stay busy! In fact, “constant employment” was “the great secret of human happiness.” James should court a girl, marry her, start a family. “I have been looking out for a wife for you,” Clay said, “but I suppose you will have to select [one] for yourself.” In any case, he begged James not to keep to himself too much. When the boy admitted that he wanted to get out more but then reported that he hadn’t, his father anxiously wanted to know why and then thought he had hit on the reason. “Do you want clothes?” he asked, possibly recalling his own boyhood awkwardness so many years before at the Chancery in Richmond, and he offered to supply money for a new wardrobe.⁴⁵ But most of all, he wanted his son to come home to Ashland. As it happened, Clay’s political plans would unite him with his son sooner than he had expected.

LIKE THE REST of the country, Lexington felt the effects of the panic, and investment capital rapidly dried up.⁴⁶ Transylvania University also felt the sting of harsh conditions. Clay actually owed the university $10,000 that he had borrowed from his friend James Morrison’s bequest to the school, which required a $600 annual payment, and he owed $1,200 a year on a $20,000 loan from John Jacob Astor. Yet his prospects remained sound despite the economic downturn. He made $72,000 in 1838 and owned property in Lexington assessed at $13,000 in 1837, which increased to $14,000 in 1838 and to $16,000 in 1839. His property in Fayette County, including Ashland, where forty-eight slaves toiled, was valued at $43,790. In addition to other out-of-state holdings, he owned land at the confluence of the Grand and Missouri rivers, near Brunswick.⁴⁷

That January, Clay showed a dark temper in clashes with colleagues. He again attacked Mississippi senator Robert J. Walker’s attempt to legislate preemption into federal land policy as a way to reward squatters at the expense of the federal Treasury. Learning from earlier experience, Clay was at first careful to distinguish between a bad policy and its potential beneficiaries by tempering his description of squatters as having “many worthy and excellent men among them,” but in the debate that followed he lost his temper. He heatedly asked why it was proper for those squatters “to seize upon and rob the United States of their possessions?” When Indiana’s John Tipton objected to Clay’s defaming his constituents, Clay heedlessly characterized squatters as a “lawless rabble.”⁴⁸ His vote against preemption hurt him in Arkansas and Missouri, but everybody could respect him for voting “the way he believed was right.”⁴⁹ His reckless remark, however, would come back to haunt him.

That spring he also snapped at nephew John S. Hart for delaying the manufacture of Ashland’s hemp while he attended to that of another uncle. It was not the first time the Harts had let him down. Hart’s brother Thomas had behaved similarly, and Clay’s patience was at an end. He was “disappointed and mortified” and vowed that unless John Hart fulfilled the bargain, their business relationship would end. “I will not be trifled with again,” Clay warned. He soon had cause to regret his edginess in this episode as well, for Hart was killed by a lightning strike that summer.⁵⁰

Otherwise, Clay lived well and had much to be grateful for. He stocked Ashland with imported wines, including a superior Madeira brought from Portugal at no small expense (almost $400 per pipe, the equivalent of 126 gallons). He wanted to give up snuff but was unable “to discontinue the use of that stimulant” and was appreciative when Kit Hughes sent him some boxes as a gift. While in Washington, he picked up the tab for posh dinner parties at the celebrated American & French Restaurant where good food and copious drink were the standard fare, along with card games. Clay still found the capital’s society, if not its politicians, sparkling. He boarded at Mrs. Hill’s, conveniently situated near Gadsby’s. His congenial fellow lodgers included John J. Crittenden, his closest friend. Samuel Southard could be morose—his marriage to an unstable hypochondriac made him more than miserable—but Tom Corwin was a genuine wag with a wicked sense of humor.⁵¹

When another boarder at Mrs. Hill’s, Representative William J. Graves, a fellow Kentuckian and friend of Clay’s, killed Maine representative Jonathan Cilley in a duel on February 24, 1838, the affair caused a national scandal that touched on Clay. Graves and Cilley had been quarreling over the character of James Watson Webb, the Whig editor of the New York Courier and Enquirer, whom the Democrat Cilley criticized and the Whig Graves defended. In the duel that resulted, Henry Wise acted as Graves’s second and was present as the antagonists squared off at eighty yards and fired three rounds at each other with rifles, the last killing Cilley. The capital was outraged by the unique barbarity of the encounter—using rifles had obviously meant a fight to the death—and the Supreme Court refused to attend Cilley’s funeral in symbolic protest just as Congress opened a lengthy debate on anti-dueling legislation. Later, after he and Clay had become enemies, Wise claimed that Clay had encouraged the affair by revising Graves’s challenge, but Clay convincingly explained that he was merely trying to soften the language in the hope of effecting a reconciliation. At the time, though, even Clay’s peripheral involvement in the incident had repercussions. A correspondent from Maine said it was hurting his presidential prospects with New Englanders repelled by dueling. He wanted Clay to make clear that he had tried to prevent the Graves-Cilley duel in particular and that he opposed the practice on principle. Clay obliged, explaining that he had tried to stop Graves and Cilley from meeting, even going so far as to involve the authorities, but unsuccessfully. Clay found the entire matter sad, sordid, and distasteful, and he insisted that he wrote privately and definitely not for publication. He had learned the hard way not to dignify with denials unfounded charges against him.⁵²

IN THE FALL of 1838, Clay asked Nicholas Biddle for a loan of $5,000 to $10,000 to help him purchase a stud horse in England. Biddle quickly approved the loan—he always took care of his bank’s friends—and lightheartedly wrote to Clay about arranging “the visit of the illustrious stranger whom you propose to invite over.” Biddle insisted that Clay did not need a cosigner. Ashland alone would cover the loan, and in any case, Biddle said, Clay had “a very fair prospect of an addition … of $25000 a year” to his income. That was the salary of the president of the United States.⁵³

Clay’s questionable political strength in the North remained a problem, though. In New York, the abolitionists had sufficient numbers in all counties west of Albany to influence if not decide elections, and Thurlow Weed doubted Clay’s ability to surmount their opposition. Weed was also worried about the Antimasons’ disapproval of Clay, a situation mirroring that of Pennsylvania, where Thaddeus Stevens and newly elected governor Joseph Ritner led that sizable faction of the Whig Party. Clay always doubted that Antimasonry would become a broad or comprehensive political movement attracting support across the Union, but in the quest for the 1840 nomination, it didn’t have to be. The Antimasons’ sway in Pennsylvania and key parts of New York were enough to cause him a great deal of trouble.⁵⁴

Clay has been described as trying to improve his standing with Upstate New Yorkers by taking an anti-British stance in the wake of a violent Anglo-American clash along the Canadian border. In 1837, a small minority of Canadians staged an uprising against British colonial rule, and quick-tempered Americans got mixed up in it because it offered a chance to twist the British lion’s tail. On December 29, 1837, the British captured and burned the American steamer Caroline, which had been supplying Canadian rebels across the Niagara, unfortunately staging the raid on the New York side of the river. The invasion of American soil was bad enough, but garish American accounts described the burning vessel as loaded with screaming victims while plunging over Niagara Falls. Actually, only one American was killed, and the Caroline had run aground well short of the falls.⁵⁵

On January 4, 1838, Van Buren received the news while hosting a gathering of Whigs at the White House, Clay among them. The president pulled General Winfield Scott aside and quietly told him, “Blood has been shed; you must go with all speed to the Niagara frontier.”⁵⁶ At first Clay took a measured tone and counseled against American anger. It was a stand consistent with his earlier attitudes.⁵⁷ Yet on January 9, he told the Senate that the British action was an “outrage … wholly unjustifiable, and not in the slightest degree palliated by any thing which preceded it.”⁵⁸ His shift in this regard was probably his reaction to the shocking and erroneous stories of the Caroline’s fate rather than an opportunistic tactic to curry New York’s favor.

Winfield Scott, who calmly and firmly managed the aftermath of the Caroline incident, gained luster in the Empire State because of these events. Thurlow Weed and William Seward actually turned to Scott as an alternative to Harrison. Similarly, Scott’s deft handling of riled tempers in Maine during the Anglo-American quarrel over ownership of the Aroostook Valley further increased his standing and gradually made him another serious rival for northern support.

The gravest injury to Clay’s candidacy resulted from a rebounding economy that caused state and local elections in the fall of 1838 to go badly for Whigs throughout the country, almost erasing their gains from the previous year. These results bewildered him. He scrutinized Ohio and wondered about the activities of the crafty Amos Kendall, who had been in Columbus a week prior to the election. “For what purpose?” Clay asked. “How easy was it for him to issue orders to his deputies and to render them effectual by appropriate means, throughout the State?”⁵⁹ Yet Whig failures could not be blamed exclusively on cunning politicos like Kendall or even the animosity of abolitionists. Something else was clearly wrong, and Whigs began to wonder if it was Henry Clay.

Clay’s appeal stemmed from the belief that his prescriptions for the economy promised improvement. If the economy did not need his correctives, Whigs feared that Clay would only unite Van Buren Democrats and push away undecided voters. When the Antimasons nominated Harrison on November 13, 1838, Clay’s luck seemed at low ebb. The meeting was held in Philadelphia, and though it professed to reflect the will of Antimasons nationally (or at least the six states that sent delegations), it was most telling for what it revealed about Pennsylvania. That state’s Antimasons had controlled the convention and were obviously committed to blocking Clay in order to promote Harrison.⁶⁰ That Antimasons now constituted a strong faction of Pennsylvania Whigs did not augur well for Clay’s chances with the state party.

By that November, Whigs fretted that Clay, Harrison, and Van Buren might divide the Electoral College to throw the election into the House, and the situation looked so grim that Clay thought about withdrawing from the contest.⁶¹ The small Whig victories in New York and Virginia provided the only bright news. In both states, Clay had been courting Democrats disaffected by Van Buren’s hard money policies, the group that styled itself conservative Democrats and included the Virginian William Cabell Rives and New Yorker Nathaniel P. Tallmadge. Achieving a combination between those elements and Clay Whigs in Virginia and New York could set up an irresistible momentum that might put him over at the Whig convention.⁶² In addition, Clay’s New York operatives tried to charm Weed by supporting Weed lieutenant William Seward for governor. That maneuver was risky and ultimately proved fruitless when Weed remained skeptical about Clay’s chances. Ironically, the Kentuckian’s support of Seward further alienated New York Antimasons.⁶³

Nor was this Clay’s only problem in New York. Webster’s supporters contrived a scheme of “triangular correspondence.” Men pretending to be Clay’s supporters in solid Clay counties wrote letters to others living in his firmest enclaves entreating hard work on his behalf because he was unexpectedly weak where they lived. Everyone was misled into believing that Clay was slipping in places where he was actually strong, an impression that stalled his momentum statewide. Evidence indicates that this technique was also applied in Ohio.⁶⁴

Clay’s plan to attract Virginia’s conservative Democrats proved unproductive as well. The plan focused on supporting Rives in his 1839 Senate reelection bid, a strategy that required blocking his Whig opponent, John Tyler. Neither party nor personal loyalty figured into this scheme, for Clay simply needed Rives’s people to secure the endorsement of the Virginia legislature; he otherwise liked and respected Tyler. Virginia’s robust states’ rights faction, dubbed the “Impracticables,” despised Rives, and the result was a yearlong stalemate between the “Practicable” Whigs supporting the Democrat Rives and the Impracticable Whigs supporting Tyler. Bad feelings festered and grudges grew. Clay was deprived of backing from Richmond when it would have most counted, and Tyler’s candidacy badly divided Virginia’s Whigs over Clay’s plans, party allegiance, and states’ rights.⁶⁵

Most exasperating of all were persistent claims in the North and South that routinely misrepresented Clay’s positions on slavery. “He ought to have seen,” Calhoun said acidly, “that it was impossible for him to take middle ground on the abolition question.”⁶⁶ On February 7, 1839, Clay delivered a major address to the Senate that was mainly an effort to quell charges from Calhoun’s quarter that he was a closet abolitionist but also addressed accusations from Van Buren’s followers and northern Whigs that he was too ardent a defender of slavery.⁶⁷ To placate the latter, Clay reprised his opinion that slavery was a moral bane on both chattel and master. He appreciated why abolitionists opposed it, he said, for they were understandably embracing an admirable moral imperative. These were not ideas of the moment, but views he had held for some time.⁶⁸

He tempered this praise with an emphatic disapproval of abolitionists for their impracticality, something he also had stated before. They proposed to end slavery but had no plans for dealing with the economic devastation that emancipation would inflict on the nation, let alone planters, a cost he reckoned at more than a billion dollars.⁶⁹ In addition, the unfeasible aims of abolitionists provided no solution to the racial imbalance that would result in those parts of the South with large slave populations. Faced with losing the strictures of social control that slavery afforded, southerners would certainly choose secession over coerced emancipation, and from that, Clay concluded that abolitionism was fomenting disunion. In fact, Clay thought that the abolitionists’ rejection of gradual compensated emancipation and colonization delayed positive steps rather than hastened them and endangered national harmony to the point of jeopardizing the country’s existence.⁷⁰

Clay’s attitudes in 1839 represented a balance between moderate northern opinion, as represented by men like Abraham Lincoln, and the anxiety of southern Whigs. Clay’s position helped to soothe the latter by reassuring them of his rightness on slavery. He continued to regard slavery as indefensible in the abstract, but he also insisted that it was anything but an abstraction. Given the choice, he would never have placed it “amongst us,” but that choice was not available. Slavery was in place and required practical solutions, not idealistic visions.⁷¹ Abolitionists who proclaimed that the Constitution should not stand in the way of abolishing slavery left Clay aghast: “If any citizens of the United States, who object to a particular part of the constitution, may elude and disregard it, other citizens, dissatisfied with other parts, have an equal right to violate them; and a universal nullification of the sacred instrument would be the necessary consequence.”⁷² Instead, Clay grounded his approach in the Jeffersonian tradition of trusting in time, a benign Providence, the “chapter of accidents,” and adherence to the rule of law to solve the problem.⁷³

Clay’s attack on the abolitionists drew grudging praise from Calhoun. “I heard the Senator from Kentucky with pleasure,” he admitted, but privately he muttered that Clay “had no choice” but to make such a speech. Calhoun assessed it as “far from being sound on many points” and doubted it would strengthen Clay’s candidacy.⁷⁴ The sour South Carolinian was not alone, for even Clay’s friends worried that the speech was too candid and would provide opportunities for both northern and southern extremists to dog his heels. He ran it by William C. Preston a few days before delivering it, and Preston warned him about its impolitic tone. Preston said that Clay emphatically responded, “I trust the sentiments and opinions are correct; I had rather be right than be President.”⁷⁵

The remark achieved wide currency and met with considerable acclaim. It seemed especially admirable when compared to the political cynicism of spoilsmen brazenly scrambling for office and patronage. Yet both friendly and critical biographers have doubted that Clay actually said it, or that if he did, he was sincere.⁷⁶ The suspicion that at best he fashioned the statement for political effect, however, does not seem to have occurred to his contemporaries. On the contrary, everyone at the time seems to have accepted it as something Clay would say. Many, in fact, firmly believed that he was too principled to be elected president, insisting that he would never abandon his core beliefs “to gain popularity. He will do right—let consequences be what they may.”⁷⁷ His behavior in this slavery debate confirmed his earnestness. His stand did prove costly with abolitionists, a bloc that for a time had actually preferred Clay to Van Buren because of “the infamous pledge” Van Buren made in his inaugural about not touching slavery in the District of Columbia.⁷⁸ Yet these same men grew disenchanted with Clay when he refused to set an example by freeing his own slaves.⁷⁹ He was still the president of the American Colonization Society, whose plans to relocate freed slaves to Africa repelled abolitionists who thought them motivated by anti-black prejudice. Clay’s February 7 speech completed the estrangement, but he had grown as impatient with abolitionists as they were with him.⁸⁰

Northern Whigs held little truck with abolitionists, but Clay’s description of slavery as a practical problem amounted to a defense of the status quo that discomfited them. On the other side, southern extremists objected to his denunciation of slavery as a moral stain. It would take more than twenty years of sectional strife and coalescing opinions before a man holding these deftly balanced attitudes could stand a chance of winning the presidency, and then it would crack the country apart. In that regard, Clay certainly knew that his expression of those opinions in 1839 carried considerable political risk.⁸¹

We might take him at his word, then, that he meant what he said, not only in his February 7 speech but also in his response to Preston’s warning about it. He had repeatedly stated that the presidency “never possessed any charms in my sight which could induce me to seek it by unworthy means, or to desire it but as the spontaneous grant of those who might alone bestow it.”⁸² Just as he did not want to become president in the absence of popular approval, he did not want to become president by being wrong. That is what he told William C. Preston.

IN EARLY 1839, as Clay seemed in eclipse, his enemies sniped at him about matters great and small. When Thomas Hart Benton pushed for “graduation” (meaning the gradual lowering of federal land prices on tracts left unsold), the debate gave Clay’s detractors a chance to revisit his criticism of squatters as a lawless rabble during the preemption debate of January 1838. The effort to depict Clay as an enemy of new states and their inhabitants brought Crittenden to his feet in defense of his friend. He insisted that Clay’s remarks were being distorted, but Illinois senator Richard M. Young cited John Tipton as his authority. Possibly Clay did not remember denouncing squatters in such derogatory terms. He had been ill and irritated in early 1838, the debate was animated, and he confided to friends that he “very seldom read any Speech made in Congress––not even my own.”⁸³ But the evidence fairly well proved that he had indeed called squatters a “lawless rabble.” Francis Preston Blair’s Washington Globe at the time noted that Clay used this phrase, and the Congressional Globe reported the exact words as having been spoken by him on January 27, 1838. Nevertheless Clay persisted in his denials. The charge, after all, could have seriously injured him in the West. He insisted that Richard Young had vindicated him, for Young had indeed exhibited an admirable sense of fairness by admitting that he might have inferred Clay’s language from the tone of his remarks rather than their precise substance. Young’s admission was a fairly weak reed, though, and the “lawless rabble” remark became another cudgel Clay himself had rashly put into the hands of his enemies.⁸⁴

It was not the West but the North, and especially New York, that most worried him that spring. The spontaneous grant of approval Clay said he required might have been welling up there if he could believe encouraging reports from Upstate residents like Tallmadge and Peter Porter. But just to be sure, Clay decided to take a summer tour through the western portion of the state, where heavy Antimason and abolitionist numbers threatened to make him weakest. He was favoring a leg injured when a horse kicked him in late April, missing his kneecap by inches, and his determination to make the trip in any event reveals how important he thought it was. Because he wanted to avoid the unseemly appearance of electioneering, he worried about how the trip would be perceived, yet he was also genuinely excited about the chance to see the Great Lakes, Canada, and Niagara Falls, none of which he had ever visited. Best of all, his son James agreed to accompany him.⁸⁵

In New York, Clay’s resolve to avoid the appearance of electioneering vanished when he became aware that Winfield Scott was the favorite of influential upstate politicians like Thurlow Weed and William Seward. Clay promptly headed for Buffalo, the informal headquarters of both New York abolitionists and Antimasons. There he delivered a speech on July 17 in which he praised the region’s natural splendor, thanked New Yorkers for supporting his stand against Britain in the War of 1812 (a way to make a passing allusion to the need for British atonement in the Carolineaffair), and promoted the cause of protective tariffs by reminding the audience of his role in the Compromise of 1833 and how it had saved the Union. Pointing out the value of internal improvements to the state’s commerce, he called for projects to be funded by the distribution of land revenues to the states.⁸⁶

The speech was designed to present him as a logical and attractive alternative to Harrison, who was at best vague on specifics of any sort of program, and to Scott, hence Clay’s allusion to his stand in 1812 and the recent British violations of the border as a way to blunt the praise lavished on Scott’s calming of the Caroline incident. He also meant to appeal to New York’s conservative Democrats, such as Tallmadge, and by showing himself in the heart of Antimasonry and abolitionism, to allay the reservation of these groups.

Clay and James continued their journey, passing through Lockport, Rochester, Canandaigua, and Oswego in the days that followed. In late July, they crossed the border to tour Montreal and Quebec, a side trip that allowed Vermont supporters to intercept him on his return and persuade him to visit Burlington. As Clay boarded the steamboat at Port Kent, he accidentally encountered William Seward, who barely concealed his discomfort over the chance meeting. Seward had been carefully avoiding Clay in the hope that he would not have to reveal his support of Winfield Scott, but the two were thrown together long enough for an awkward conversation on the ride down Lake Champlain. Seward told Clay that New York abolitionists would not abide him, but Clay politely disagreed. After all, he had evidence from his journey that New Yorkers of all stripes were more than enthusiastic about him.⁸⁷

By the time he and James arrived at the United States Hotel in Saratoga—a holiday there being the ostensible reason for the entire trip—Clay was quite pleased with his undertaking, despite his uncomfortable conversation with Seward. Large, spirited crowds had turned out everywhere he went, and his arrival at Saratoga on August 9 was marked by a spectacular welcome. A sizable committee and numerous citizens met him on the outskirts of town. He climbed into a new barouche drawn by four gray horses and started for the resort as a band struck up a lively march. The parade that trailed him stretched for more than a mile. Artillery barked from the hills, cheering crowds choked the streets, and the large piazza in front of the hotel was filled with ladies, there by exclusive reservation. The day had started out stormy, but the sun was shining by the time John Taylor greeted Saratoga’s famous guest. Clay responded with an hour-long speech that Philip Hone thought could have been shorter and less political, but the crowd shouted its approval and women wildly waved their handkerchiefs. That evening a glittering reception for him was attended by eight hundred people, many of them among the nation’s most distinguished citizens.⁸⁸

Clay’s visit to Saratoga coincided with the zenith of the social season. “All the world is here,” noted Hone. “Politicians and dandies; cabinet ministers and ministers of the gospel; office-holders and office-seekers; hum-buggers and humbugged; fortune-hunters and hunters of woodcock; anxious mothers and lovely daughters: the ruddy cheek mantling with saucy health, and the flickering lamp almost extinguished beneath the rude breath of dissipation.”⁸⁹ Winfield Scott, whose star was “fast rising,” was also at Saratoga that August, as was President Van Buren, staying on the same floor as Clay. Everyone was good-natured. The president sent Lucretia greetings, “as he always does,” said Clay, and the two had a comical encounter in a packed corridor. “I hope I do not obstruct your way,” said Van Buren. “Not here, certainly,” laughed Clay.⁹⁰ He, Scott, and Van Buren all appeared in the grand saloon of the United States Hotel one evening to trade quips with one another while gallantly mingling with the “fair ladies.”⁹¹

Clay’s time at Saratoga was thus an unbroken series of pleasantries marred only briefly by James’s taking a tumble from a horse that then stepped on his ankle. Clay assured Lucretia that James was only injured “a little” and was healing nicely, so even that event was a minor distraction.⁹²

And then Thurlow Weed arrived. The Albany lobbyist had tried to get Horace Greeley to travel to Saratoga and convey New York’s reservations about Clay’s presidential aspirations, but the editor got only as far as Albany before the prospect of an unpleasant interview caused him to abort the errand. Weed then took on the job himself and had a meeting with Clay that he later remembered as “something of an ordeal.”⁹³ He told Clay that he should withdraw from the contest because his considerable political liabilities jeopardized Whig success on both national and state levels. Too many voters, said Weed, were repelled by his support of the BUS, by his ties to the Masons, by his slaves at Ashland, by his recent attack on abolitionists. That very month, returns from Indiana, North Carolina, and Tennessee had signaled dismaying Whig defeats, clearly demonstrating that something was wrong. Weed said that it was Clay.

Clay countered that the cheering crowds throughout Upstate New York refuted this grim assessment. He even thought that abolitionists had warmed to him. He refused to withdraw, but now he at least knew clearly where the New York political establishment stood, a confirmation of his suspicions raised by his meeting with Seward, an encounter the governor made plain would not be repeated. Seward always claimed that his differences with Clay were only political, but the simple fact of the matter was that he did not like “Harry of the West.”⁹⁴

At the end of August, Clay concluded his tour with a visit to New York City, arriving from Newburgh aboard the steamer James Madison on August 21. A grand procession escorted him up Broadway to the steps of City Hall, where dignitaries greeted him with appropriate remarks. Clay replied with a speech that Philip Hone this time found suitably shorter, although the brevity was less a stylistic decision than a physical necessity, for Clay was nearly exhausted. He took rooms at the Astor House, and an endless parade of visitors began consuming his three-day stay while his evenings included trips to the theater. Audiences broke into spontaneous applause upon his appearance and spent performances hardly looking at the stage, instead craning their necks to glimpse him in his box. Weighing the official accolades and surveying the popular approbation, Philip Hone likened it to the treatment afforded Lafayette. Clay was sure to win the presidency, he thought, except that the Whigs were “the most untractable, unreliable party which ever stood up against corruption and bad government.”⁹⁵

Democrats viewed Clay’s progress as warily as did New York’s Whig leaders. James Gordon Bennett’s Herald chronicled Clay’s movements with a mixture of grudging admiration and mocking humor. Bennett was no admirer of Van Buren, and the Herald told of the enormous crowd that accompanied Clay to the wharf on Liberty Street for his departure. A man reportedly grabbed Clay’s hand and squarely met his eye, exclaiming, “Look here, old Harry, God bless you!” Clay was used to this sort of thing, of course, but it was a stirring close to the trip. The man kept Clay’s hand clasped and shouted, “If you don’t beat that d—d Kinderhook poney, you’re a gone sucker, and no mistake.”⁹⁶

Clay had no intention of being a gone sucker. That September, as he and James headed home through Baltimore and Philadelphia, Whigs in Virginia assembled in Staunton, endorsed him for president, and named Nathaniel P. Tallmadge as his running mate, putting Virginia in Clay’s camp with an incentive for New York to follow. In addition, the meeting appointed Clay’s friends James Barbour and Benjamin Watkins Leigh to the delegation for the Harrisburg convention.⁹⁷ More than ever, Seward’s and Weed’s warnings seemed easy to dismiss.

CLAY HAD HARDLY returned to Ashland before his candidacy began to unravel. In Indiana his enemies revived the Corrupt Bargain charge and insisted that only Harrison could take the state from Van Buren. Rumors in New York told of his quitting the race. He sent a chilly letter to Seward asking him to quash them, but he began to sense that he was facing an overwhelming tide. Supporters in North Carolina continued to pledge their support, but they concluded that Harrison was more “available,” which was the word at the time to describe a candidate as electable. Continuing Whig reverses in state contests depressed him. “The elections everywhere this year,” he said with uncharacteristic melancholy, “indicate unexpected success on the part of the Administration.”⁹⁸

In one sense, Clay was quite correct to characterize Democrat victories as unexpected, though his discernment was not evident at the time. The economic recovery that had been dimming his chances since 1838 turned out to be unsustainable in the face of financial setbacks overseas, and when British lenders called loans in October 1839, more than eight hundred American banks were forced to suspend specie payments. The depression that ensued ran even deeper than the one caused by the Panic of 1837, but its consequences also spread throughout the country more slowly. Not until the following spring and summer did it become apparent that economic woes had returned with a vengeance, and by then the Whigs had chosen their nominee. Working from the erroneous belief that the economy was sound, they concluded that Clay could not win, unaware of the renewed financial catastrophe that would engulf Van Buren and finally do him in. Anyone could have been elected over Martin Van Buren in 1840.⁹⁹

That “anyone” was not to be Clay, however. In the fall of 1839, as the economic downturn was occurring but not yet being felt, Weed and Seward were determined to nominate Winfield Scott. The string of Whig defeats beginning in the fall of 1838 and continuing through 1839 convinced them that Harrison was no better than Clay, because Harrison had been the front-runner when Democrats rebounded. Harrison tried to counter this perception by highlighting his attractiveness with wavering Democrats, Antimasons, and legions of veterans. He was also careful not to antagonize anyone. He assured Clay that he never viewed Clay’s trip through Ohio as poaching on his turf, and he claimed to be embarrassed that he was contending against Clay for the nomination, a situation he oddly described as having been forced on him by “fate.” Harrison’s noncommittal stance did not deceive Clay. He was instead more convinced than ever that Harrison was pursuing and fully expected to receive the nomination.¹⁰⁰

Events in Pennsylvania also took a troubling turn for Clay that fall. A group of former Antimasons, now Whigs, led by Thaddeus Stevens, withdrew from the state Whig convention over Clay’s candidacy and under the disingenuous banner of “Harmony” endorsed Harrison. Stevens’s motives were partly mercenary: he hoped for a cabinet post in a Harrison administration. Born into poverty, Stevens had clawed his way to affluence with a relentless program of self-promotion. He wore an unsightly wig that accentuated his bald pate and had an awkward gait because of a clubfoot. Such defects in any other man would have stirred pity, but Thaddeus Stevens was so exceedingly disagreeable that he rarely aroused compassion. Nobody could recall his ever smiling. Though not a delegate to the national convention in Harrisburg, Stevens would control those from Pennsylvania who were committed to Harrison. Thurlow Weed had hopes that the two Pennsylvania delegations, one for Clay and the other for Harrison, would cancel each other out and boost Winfield Scott’s chances as a compromise alternative.¹⁰¹

OFFICIALLY LABELED THE Democratic Whig National Convention, the gathering opened proceedings at Harrisburg on December 4, 1839, in the Old Zion Lutheran Church on Fourth Street. It was a historic assemblage, for it would actually nominate a presidential candidate rather than ratify a decision already made somewhere else. As a consequence, a great deal of uncharted ground lay before the delegates, and the prize was accordingly destined to fall to those who were most organized and able to map their way. As much as Clay had anything resembling an organization, it was based on promoting the American System. Clay supporters recruited followers based on their adherence to that program and their commitment to its advancement. That tie was supposed to bind them to Henry Clay, the American System’s most constant advocate, making issues the dominant theme of the campaign. Moreover, Clay’s strategy appealed to state and local leaders, confident that the rank and file would follow.

Yet it was a dubious political approach in 1839. With the exception of Clay’s New York tour the previous summer, his calls to action went out to lieutenants in the Whig leadership. Enthusiasm at the grass roots was presumably just supposed to happen, like the currents of a river cutting a new channel according to the laws of nature. In part this certainty arose from Clay’s belief that sensible people would find his program sensible, but it was also a result of his distaste for electioneering, something he briefly overcame that summer, but only after much soul-searching, after protests that he was not really campaigning, and finally after the realization of a compelling need to make his case with the people, at least in Upstate New York. Clay’s reluctance gave the impression that he was aloof and lacked the common touch at a time when Jacksonian Democrats had made the common touch an essential part of popular politics.

It was not true, of course, that Clay was aloof. Rather, he represented a different time and a more sedate sort of election politics. He was never able to understand, in any case, how it was possible for men like Weed to say that the people did not want him, when clearly the people were keen about him. It was rather the state leadership who opposed him, and he thought it incredible, exasperating, and undemocratic that while “eight or nine tenths of the Whigs” in New York preferred him, Weed and his ilk “preferred to make a nomination in conformity with the wishes of the one or two tenths.”¹⁰²

Even if men like Weed had found Clay politically appealing (and they did not), they would have regarded him as damaged goods because they did not believe in much of anything beyond victory at the polls. Clay’s approach had already failed in 1832. A campaign based on issues had revealed itself to be nothing more than a sure way to lose elections.¹⁰³ Weed could claim that he wanted to reject Clay to spare him the “mortification” of certain defeat, but he was really more interested in not losing the opportunity for certain victory against an unpopular president. Like Stevens, Weed was not a delegate, but also like Stevens, he attended sessions in Harrisburg as a ubiquitous presence. He tirelessly promoted Winfield Scott, just as Stevens did William Henry Harrison. Given a level playing field, these two, acting too clever by half, could have maneuvered themselves and their champions out of the picture. Yet they made sure the field was anything but level, and each in a different way exerted considerable control through disciplined organizations. The evidence of their cunning was their ability to block Clay, whose candidacy was actually quite hardy when the gavel first came down and the convention began establishing its rules.

Clay’s candidacy was strongest, but it was also beset by difficulties. His support was most solid in the South, but southerners were underrepresented in the convention because Georgia, South Carolina, and Tennessee did not send delegations, for the reasons that Clay had feared, and the delegate from Arkansas was too late in arriving.¹⁰⁴ Clay’s most serious problem, though, arose from the torpor of his operatives, who let the convention spin away from them by agreeing to incredibly damaging compromises and rules. Resolving Pennsylvania’s confused situation resulted in an agreement that nullified Clay’s significant minority support in the Keystone State. The Chambersburg (Clay) delegation was combined with the more numerous “Harmony” (Harrison) delegation, making the latter the majority and giving Thaddeus Stevens control of Pennsylvania’s vote.

But the method of balloting that the convention adopted dealt Clay’s chances the worst blow. Harrison delegates from Massachusetts—Webster’s former but no less spiteful partisans were at work—cooperated with Pennsylvanian Charles Penrose (Stevens’s lieutenant) to install what amounted to a unit rule for counting state ballots. Employing a convoluted process of secret votes polled through committees, a state’s majority would count as a winner-take-all result. The procedure instantly made Clay’s numerous minority votes in New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio immaterial, votes that otherwise would have helped advance him toward the nomination in a straightforward poll. Clay supporters did not realize how they had been bested until it was too late, and when Clay’s cousin Cassius Clay tried before the decisive final ballot to have all the delegates polled and Maryland supporter Reverdy Johnson tried to restore individual balloting, they were summarily slammed down. Thomas Hart Benton later called these shrewd maneuvers by Weed, Stevens, and others a mixture of “algebra and alchemy” and correctly concluded that they had meant the “political death of Mr. Clay.”¹⁰⁵

Yet not right away. Clay even led on the first ballot with 103 votes to Harrison’s 91 and Scott’s 57, but that plurality was as close as he ever got to the majority of 128 necessary for the nomination. Weed immediately went to work to seize the momentum by persuading anyone who would listen that Clay’s slender numbers revealed he could not win the general election. He managed to peel Connecticut away from Clay and to end a deadlock in the Michigan delegation, throwing both states into Scott’s column. The result was that Clay slipped on the second ballot to 95 while Scott’s numbers increased to 68. Harrison held steady at 91. Thaddeus Stevens then made his move. Scott’s momentum could have been decisive at this point, and Weed was preparing to approach the Virginia delegation to persuade it to make the switch from Clay. But Stevens was just as diligent and even more devious than Weed. The grim Pennsylvanian limped frowning among the delegates, seemingly without purpose, but his object was to drop a piece of paper, seemingly by accident, in the midst of the Virginians, who promptly examined it. The document shocked them. It was a letter from Winfield Scott to New Yorker Francis Granger currying favor with New York antislavery forces. Nobody ever discovered how Stevens came by the letter, but the Virginians immediately announced that they would never support Scott, which meant an ebbing Clay would make Harrison the nominee.¹⁰⁶

Virginia’s declaration in fact broke the dam. Weed was stunned at first, but he quickly realized that without the South, Scott didn’t stand a chance. He moved just as quickly to swing the Scott votes he controlled into line with Harrison to prevent Clay from scooping them up. The proverbial bandwagon now came into play as more and more Scott delegates scrambled aboard for Harrison. Even a handful of Clay supporters joined them. The third and final ballot gave Harrison the nomination with 148 votes, 20 more than he needed. Clay had dropped to 90, and poor Scott, who would never learn his lesson about writing foolish letters, stood at a mere 16. While the manipulations of northerners like Weed and Stevens were the most apparent causes of Clay’s defeat, it was ironically southerners who really lost him the nomination: those who would have voted for him didn’t show up, and those who did show up made the avowal that wrecked Scott, whose numbers went to Harrison.¹⁰⁷

The choice of Harrison flabbergasted those southerners, and Clay stalwarts, regardless of section, were livid over what they regarded as a contemptible intrigue. Although the choice was eventually unanimous, thanks in large part to Henry Clay, Thurlow Weed nervously surveyed Clay’s angry supporters and gauged the unity as “anything but cordial.”¹⁰⁸ The convention now strained to conciliate southerners and Clay’s friends by selecting a southerner who was also a friend of Clay’s for the vice presidency. The ballot nominating Harrison occurred near midnight on Friday, December 6, and urgent negotiations by the Weed-Stevens organizations to complete the ticket continued into the wee hours of Saturday. Yet finding an avowed Clay supporter who was willing to run with Harrison proved easier said than done. Reverdy Johnson announced that neither he nor John M. Clayton, who was not at Harrisburg, would accept. Benjamin Watkins Leigh also refused. Thurlow Weed was possibly telling the truth that the inability to find a Clay southerner finally compelled the choice of at least some southerner willing to accept, and that turned out to be John Tyler. Many believed at the time that Tyler was a Clay southerner, for he had been committed to Clay during the convention and was described by Greeley as weeping over his defeat. Whether Tyler cried that Friday night or not, he cheerfully and eagerly accepted the convention’s nearly unanimous nomination the next day. Leigh announced that Virginia would refrain from voting for one of its own members. Possibly the Old Dominion’s delegation did act from a sense of “delicacy,” as Leigh tactfully explained.¹⁰⁹

The convention adjourned without declaring any fixed principles, an omission that, along with their issueless but appealing nominee, contributed to the myth that the Whigs did not actually stand for anything. Nobody seems to have given any additional thought to the selection of John Tyler. His task was merely “to be,” that is to say, to balance the ticket and, as some thought, to placate Clay by the simple fact of being placed on it. The Virginia delegation’s behavior, however, was an early warning sign. Tyler was an honorable man, but his mild demeanor disguised obstinacy and pride, which his fellow Virginians had glimpsed before. His resignation in 1836 over the Expunging Resolution struck some as grandstanding, and it had made Benjamin Watkins Leigh appear indecisive. The protracted contest with Rives over the Senate seat had also created ill will. Yet, as the delegates finished up at Harrisburg, nobody seemed to have given any additional thoughts, cheerful or foreboding, to the selection of John Tyler.¹¹⁰

When it was all over, Clay certainly had a right to be bitter, because his friends’ inactivity as much as his enemies’ machinations had cost him the nomination. More than three decades later, Henry A. Wise described Clay’s reaction to the selection of Harrison in colorful but extremely unflattering terms. Wise said that Clay on the evening of December 6 had been drinking heavily and upon hearing the news from Harrisburg exploded into a drunken, profane rage. Stalking back and forth, he reportedly shouted, “My friends are not worth the powder and shot it would take to kill them!” Wise said that he and friends had tried to calm Clay, but he would not be stopped: “It is a diabolical intrigue, I know now, which has betrayed me. I am the most unfortunate man in the history of parties: always run by my friends when sure to be defeated, and now betrayed for a nomination when I, or anyone, would be sure of an election.” Wise also recalled that from that moment until February 1844, Clay “was excessively intemperate in his habits, and more intemperate in exacerbation of temper and in his political conduct.” Wise cited an alleged confrontation with Winfield Scott at a reception in Boulanger’s restaurant as well as Clay’s irritable conduct in the Senate to indicate that in disappointment, the Kentuckian had become a mean drunk.¹¹¹

Wise’s account and reproachful observations did not appear until 1872, and though they contained references to others witnessing Clay’s embarrassing behavior, Wise was the only person ever to recall it. It soon became part of the Clay lore, however. In 1887, Lucius P. Little published a lengthy and admiring biography of Kentuckian Ben Hardin, a political opponent of Clay’s, that drew freely on the reminiscences of Wise and other Clay adversaries. John Pope, for example, was said to have been relieved by the result at Harrisburg because of Clay’s overweening ambition. “We should have witnessed in America all the extravagancies of the Bonaparte dynasty, and hazarded all the calamities it brought upon France,” Pope was alleged to have said, leaving one to wonder what on earth he was talking about. Lucius Little also elaborated on Clay’s encounter with Scott that was supposed to have occurred at a Washington banquet Scott gave for Harrison after the Harrisburg convention. “I am happy to meet you, Mr. Clay,” Scott said with his hand extended. “I’ll be d—d if you are, General Scott,” Clay supposedly replied. Recall that the previous summer they had both been at Saratoga at the United States Hotel. At the time, Clay knew that Weed and Seward were supporting Scott but nevertheless remained on jovial terms with him.¹¹²

Clay’s biographers have always repeated these anecdotes, sometimes with the caveat that Wise became Clay’s unswerving foe in the early 1840s. One of Tyler’s biographers, however, discounted much of what Wise said as having been supplied “by a vivid imagination,” and the editors of Clay’s papers simply dismiss the Virginian’s account as a fabrication.¹¹³ Too often these stories have been given too much credence. Not until their appearance in the 1870s and 1880s did a single report describe Clay’s response to the Harrisburg convention in this way. At the time, anti-Clay newspapers only said, also without evidence, that he was disappointed over being “politically dead” or lampooned his generous replies to Whig testimonials.¹¹⁴

The documentary evidence supplies a completely different picture. Weeks before Whigs gathered at Harrisburg, Clay on November 20, 1839, supplied Kentucky delegates to the convention with a letter in which he said that if he were not chosen, “the nomination will have my best wishes, and receive my cordial support.” Leslie Combs read this letter to the convention on December 7, and it did much to relieve a tense situation. In addition, Clay partisan Reverdy Johnson, angry about the manipulations of Weed and Stevens but obeying Clay’s call for unity, proposed that the Harrison and Tyler nominations be made unanimous.¹¹⁵ Clay wrote to his son Thomas within days of Harrison’s nomination to say that “I should be sorry that you or any of my friends or connexions should display any irritation or dissatisfaction about it.” He told Henry Jr. exactly the same thing.¹¹⁶ When Whig delegates from eighteen of the twenty-two states at the convention attended a testimonial dinner for Clay at Brown’s Hotel in Washington on December 11, 1839, twenty-four speakers praised him for his high-mindedness, and he responded with a glowing testimonial to Harrison. Clay insisted that the upcoming election was not about himself or Webster or Scott. “Vote heartily,” he told them, “vote heartily, as I shall, for the nomination which has been made.” He concluded to lusty applause that “not men, but principles, are our rules of action.”¹¹⁷ Harrison later thanked him for “the magnanimity of your conduct towards me in relation to the nomination for the Presidency.”¹¹⁸

In addition to these public and private statements, Clay actively campaigned for the ticket by delivering almost a dozen major addresses in 1840, most notably during a tour in Virginia, a large rally at Baltimore, and a visit to Nashville, Tennessee. To those who wavered and found little good in Harrison’s candidacy, Clay was insistent that “with Harrison there is hope, much hope, with V. Buren there is no hope whatever.”¹¹⁹

Rather than nursing a grudge, he felt like “a free man, at liberty to pursue my own inclinations, and unembarrassed by 10 or 12 months of turmoil.” At least part of him apparently agreed with the correspondent who also found a silver lining in the failed bid for the nomination by observing that to contend for the presidency, “a man has to give up his own self respect or every hour give offense to some pedagogue that stands over him with uplifted rod.”¹²⁰

DEMOCRATS GATHERED AT Baltimore and halfheartedly nominated Van Buren for another run, despite his connection to the country’s financial distress, again in full sway by early 1839. They were accustomed to Jackson’s popularity winning the White House, even for his successor, and they now faced the prospect of having the tactic turned on them.¹²¹

The Whigs called the president “Martin Van Ruin” and set about making their aging nominee into a reasonable Whig facsimile of Old Hickory. They referred to Harrison as “Tippecanoe” or “Old Tip” to revive memories of his victory at Prophetstown on Tippecanoe Creek in 1811. He insisted that he was still strong and vigorous. Throughout the campaign, he repeated, as if by rote, that his “bodily health” was “actually better than it has been for ten years.”¹²²

Nationally, the lack of a platform helped Whigs avoid inconvenient pledges that might have alienated this or that faction within the party. They instead concentrated on elevating Old Tip to the presidency with songs and symbols. Shortly after the Harrisburg convention, a dim-witted Democrat journalist accidentally gave them the most potent of those symbols. Asked by a disappointed Clay supporter how to persuade Harrison to withdraw in Clay’s favor, the reporter scoffed that Harrison would be content with a pension, a log cabin, and a barrel of hard cider.¹²³

Within weeks, Whigs had merrily adopted the hard cider barrel and rude log cabin as badges of honor. On January 20, 1840, a couple of enterprising Pennsylvanians came up with the idea of projecting a large transparency on a wall. The picture purported to show Harrison’s cabin complete with coonskin cap and cider barrel. Armed with these rousing symbols, the campaign took on the air of a religious revival.¹²⁴ Harrison was peddled as the plain but virtuous Ohio farmer, reluctant but willing to answer his country’s call and toss out crooked Democrat spoilsmen. Of course, candidate Harrison bore little resemblance to the real Harrison, who was not of lowly birth but hailed from a prominent Virginia family. He did not live in humble poverty, did not sleep in a one-room log cabin, and preferred whiskey to hard cider. In fact, putting Harrison over as a man of modest origins was a remarkable feat. Far from residing in a simple log cabin, he lived in a sixteen-room mansion on a farm that stretched across three thousand acres near North Bend, Ohio.

Even more remarkably, Whigs distorted the public’s perception of Martin Van Buren. His youth had been truly impoverished, but Whigs branded him a pompous blue blood. They called him “Sweet Sandy Whiskers,” claiming that he perfumed his muttonchops, wore corsets, and preferred sissified French cuisine over hearty American fare. Worst of all, they erroneously reported him as turning the White House into an opulent palace at public expense. Old Tip wore simple homespun and swigged hard cider, Whigs boasted, while Little Van donned ruffled shirts and sipped champagne, a frivolous fop, a contemptible squirt.¹²⁵

Enormous Whig rallies and long lines of Whigs marched while chanting slogans emphasizing the failure of Van Buren’s financial policies. Entrepreneurs hawked log cabin symbolism in every way imaginable. Yet by far the most memorable device of the campaign was the Whig slogan “Tippecanoe and Tyler Too,” which combined Harrison’s bona fides as a military hero with alliteration on his running mate’s name, a phrase that the aristocratic Philip Hone sniffed provided “rhyme, but no reason.”¹²⁶ Inspired by the campaign’s official beverage, cider-guzzling Whigs howled the slogan as they pushed large balls through towns and villages to represent the snowballing majority for Harrison. Such hogwash seemed to substitute for serious discussion, and ever since, most historians have insisted that hullabaloo and flummery dominated the 1840 campaign.

Democrats and Whigs, however, held different beliefs and promoted different positions, and the people were quite aware of those differences and the choices available to them. Whigs existed for other reasons than opposing Andrew Jackson, and despite their diversity they developed a coherent political philosophy and became a rational ideological movement. True enough, differences among party members presented a bundle of contradictions: the party was a home for Masons (like Clay) and Antimasons (like Thaddeus Stevens), supporters of the tariff, proponents of free trade, planters with slaves, northern abolitionists, national bank advocates, national bank opponents, devotees of the American System, foes of the American System. Yet Democrats presented just as many contradictions. Jacksonians claimed to exalt individual liberty and ferociously condemned anything that smacked of “privilege,” but they enforced party discipline by punishing individualism and rewarding conformity with a patronage system that nurtured the very privilege they decried. They had, grumbled Clay, “without the smallest pretense of right to the denomination, erroneously assumed the name of Democrats, and … under color of that name, they have made rapid and fearful progress in consolidating an elective monarchy.” They had denounced the BUS while trying to create a government bank and had denounced internal improvements while funding expensive projects under other labels. In fact, Jacksonians were not opposed to a national bank but were specifically opposed to Biddle’s bank because it posed as a huge pool of patronage beyond their control. The attitude, as one economic historian has noted, threw them into wild inconsistencies.¹²⁷

Though Democrats claimed to represent the common people and characterized the Whigs as elites, both parties attracted Americans from all classes and sections. The widely diverse membership was healthy because it encouraged compromise and kept factions from adopting extreme positions or pushing for drastic measures. Party strength throughout the nation also delayed the formation of sectional political blocs, such as an inflexible southern one defending slavery or a northern one assaulting it, though that day was coming. For the time being, most Democrats and Whigs avoided the slavery controversy because it divided their northern and southern wings and jeopardized their chances in national elections. When Calhoun notably abandoned this prudence to adopt a take-no-prisoners approach in late 1838, he offered a revealing glimpse of Democrat objections to other aspects of the Whig program. For example, Democrat hostility to internal improvements stemmed as much from the desire to protect slavery as from constitutional scruples. At a time when southerners were committed to preserving the status quo, an economy transformed by a market revolution promised diversity and all the unwelcome changes that came with it. In addition, a government capable of central planning would also have the power in theory to abolish slavery.¹²⁸

Americans were conscious of the differences between the parties, even when those differences took the form of general abstractions. Because Democrats said that the native intelligence of good, sturdy Americans would embrace and protect liberty as a natural exercise, they saw publicly funded schools as unnecessary. Whigs believed that ignorance was the path to tyranny and that only an educated citizenry could preserve its liberty. Democrats were suspicious of social reformers; Whigs promoted moral reform, especially temperance, despite the hard cider symbolism of 1840. Moreover, Whigs saw society as naturally harmonious, regarded community as an engine of progress, and believed government should promote economic growth and national development, while Democrats fiercely protected states’ rights and insisted on keeping federal involvement in social and economic matters at the barest minimum. As Van Buren had shown in response to the panic, Democrats believed that allowing matters to sort themselves out was the best way to handle economic distress. Whigs wanted the government to establish a national bank to stabilize the currency, wanted protective tariffs to promote American industry, wanted internal improvements to facilitate American commerce. Democrats wanted an expanding, expansive “agricultural empire” and consequently pushed for Texas annexation and later fought a war to acquire California. Whigs wanted economic improvement through internal improvements and recoiled from expansionism. Clay thought the country was large enough and should focus on developing what it had, especially since acquiring new territory always caused harmful arguments over slavery. Webster even envisioned a partitioning of North America into three republics, with the United States controlling the East, Texas the Southwest, and California the West.¹²⁹

Whigs were a motley bunch, but they did have a vision for the country that they expressed in concrete terms. Democrats wrote a platform at the Baltimore convention, but their positions more resembled a bundle of attitudes than they did a consistent ideology. They exalted local control of affairs and sought to preserve it through strict party loyalty. The Whigs did not care for political parties and formed one only because, as Clay pointed out, it proved impossible to win elections without it. Political parties “can only … be extinguished,” he conceded, “by extinguishing their cause, free Government, a free press, and freedom of opinion.”¹³⁰

On the national stage, Clay himself addressed specifics of the Whig agenda during his New York tour in the summer of 1839 and then during his campaign speeches for Harrison in early 1840. The party did not believe it could elect Henry Clay in 1840, but that did not mean it did not stand for anything. As a first principle, Whigs were committed to ending petty and palpable corruptions in government institutionalized by the Spoils System and by disgraceful political tactics to keep incumbents in power. Clay thought such practices simply “demoralizing.”

Misrepresentation, falsehood, bribery, forgery, perjury, corruption of the Ballot boxes, have all been established upon members of that [Democrat] party. When one party employs such means, sooner or later, in self defense and from necessity, the other party will be tempted to appeal to the same arts. And the corruption of the whole mass will quickly follow. Then, farewell to Liberty.¹³¹

For Whigs, protecting American liberty was a paramount obligation and just as important as repairing the economy. By running for office on a party ticket, a candidate necessarily pledged to carry out the party’s program if elected. The people rightly expected it. The people would have known precisely what they were getting with Henry Clay. At the time of the Harrisburg convention, however, William Henry Harrison’s most appealing feature for shrewd Whig politicos was that his views on issues were at best vaguely apprehended. He was attractive precisely because he had no issues to harm him and no enemies to assail him. But he too understood his responsibility to stand with the people who worked for his election and at least not block their way after victory. “I have made promises of great amendments in the administration of public affairs,” Tom Corwin declared, “& I do not wish to be made out a liar & fool both, by the history of the first six months of the new era.”¹³²

As Whigs marched on the campaign trail in 1840, they had assurances from Harrison himself that in victory he would not frustrate them, would not make them appear to be liars and fools. He did not come out explicitly for a new national bank, for instance, but he made clear that if Congress felt one was needed, he would not stand in the way.¹³³ It was a reassuring endorsement of legislative supremacy, another first principle for Whigs, and such statements by Harrison comforted Clay and his friends.

Nobody seems to have given much thought to John Tyler’s opinions on the matter.